UVa researchers eye technology to improve diagnosis of troop brain injuries

Researchers at the University of Virginia are working on technology that could diagnose soldiers with traumatic brain injuries right on the battlefield.

Dr. James Stone, an assistant professor of radiology and medical imaging at the UVa School of Medicine, said the work could lead to better treatments and protective gear for soldiers.

A traumatic brain injury, or TBI, is a traumatically induced structural injury or disruption of brain function caused by an external force.

“We’re looking at ways to better diagnose TBI with imaging,” Stone said. “We have this idea and baseline research and we’re now in the process of seeing what is possible.”

Funded by $6 million in grants from the Department of Defense, UVa researchers are working with federal laboratories on two methods to diagnose TBI in soldiers more quickly, Stone said.

UVa researchers are hoping to create a hand-held ultrasound machine that can be taken to the battlefield to diagnose soldiers earlier.

“The idea is to make something fairly small, but rugged so it would survive in the warzone environment,” Stone said. “The technology would allow a combat medic to pull someone off the field quickly and check them [for a TBI].”

The second TBI-related research project at UVa will provide a more detailed look at the area of the brain where a traumatic injury is present, Stone said.

Researchers are in the early stages of developing probes to determine at a cellular level whether someone has a traumatic brain injury, he said. Currently, the standard methods for detecting brain injuries are through magnetic resonance imaging or computed tomography scans, which provide more general information.

“There are a lot of folks who have a normal MRI, but we know they’ve had a traumatic brain injury,” Stone said. “This could give us a better way to look at the injury inside the brain.”

According to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center in Washington, 202,281 service members have been diagnosed as having some form of TBI since 2000.

Although the number of cases has increased every year since 2005, the DoD statistics show many of the cases are considered to be mild concussions.

The Department of Defense has invested a lot of funding for TBI research since 2005, Stone said.

This research ranges from finding better ways to diagnose soldiers to methods of treatment for injuries to prevention methods.

“[The Department of Defense] is committed to fast-tracking promising research and to improving the diagnosis and treatment of TBI to benefit service members, veterans and their families,” said Kathy Helmick, deputy director for TBI for the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, in a recent article by the American Forces Press Service.

Helmick said significant advancements in TBI management have been made in the last several years, the article said.

“Navigating the clinical challenges providers face in the field is critical to ensuring that we’re employing state-of-the-art care for all levels of TBI severity, from concussions to severe and penetrating brain injuries,” Helmick said in the article.

UVa researchers also are now studying medical scans of soldiers who regularly have low-level blast exposure through their work and training, Stone said.

He hopes that work will lead to more understanding on the occupational hazards of such repetitive blast exposure.

Stone said treatment for traumatic brain injury is still on a case-by-case basis, with diagnostics and rehabilitation playing important roles.

“If you think of healing as recovery of function then, yes, you can [heal] from a TBI,” Stone said. “When it comes to TBI, it comes down to wait and see.”